At the beginning of 2019, new regulations came into effect in Canada that prohibit the import, use, sale, manufacture, and export of asbestos and products containing asbestos. These updated federal regulations mark an important step forward after years of attempts to ban asbestos.

A fierce debate was recently unleashed in Ontario when the provincial government introduced Bill 66, which is said to be about reducing “red tape.” As soon as someone says those words, most people are all for it. Who hasn’t been frustrated by some long, obscure form to fill out at one point or another?

CELA’s core mandate is to use and improve the law in order to safeguard the environment, protect the interests of low-income and vulnerable communities, and ensure access to environmental justice.

In Ontario, however, it now appears that our main challenge is not to incrementally strengthen provincial laws, but to fend off ill-advised governmental attempts to repeal key environmental statutes and eliminate environmental regulations as “red tape.”

A message about federal environmental assessments is being circulated by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, one of Canada’s energy regulators, with the potential to undermine the fundamental principles of Canadian environmental assessment environmental assessment law and remove significant nuclear projects from federal environmental assessment review.

Background: Ontario is about to lose its independent Environmental Commissioner, as part of cuts announced by the Ford government on November 15, 2018. The details were laid out in Bill 57, an omnibus bill. The government cut three independent watchdogs all in the same announcement; Ontario’s Child Advocate, the French-Language Services Commissioner and the Environmental Commissioner, with some aspects of their work to be passed off to other agencies. The government’s stated rationale for Bill 57 was “to restore trust, transparency and accountability in government.”

In an earlier blog post, CELA expressed its happiness that the re-negotiated North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), known as the United States-Mexico-Canada-[Trade] Agreement (USMCA), does not include the controversial investor state dispute settlement process.

On October 1, 2018, a new trade deal was announced between Canada, the US and Mexico, replacing the current North American Free Trade Agreement with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. In the early hours of October 1, the #USMCA twitterstorm began and with it, confirmation that ISDS - the controversial investor state dispute settlement provision in NAFTA’s Chapter 11 which allowed private companies to sue Canada, where $2.6 billion in damages have been claimed to date - had been removed from the re-negotiated agreement.

The Federal Court of Appeal recently overturned the Government of Canada’s approval of Kinder Morgan’s proposal to triple the capacity of the Trans Mountain pipeline system that currently runs from Alberta to the British Columbia coast.

In a lengthy judgment, the Court ruled that the federal government did not fulfill its duty under section 35 of the Constitution Act 1982 to meaningfully consult Indigenous communities and to accommodate their concerns about the project.

This summer will be a tough time for the Great Lakes. Media in the U.S. and Canada reported that there will be a significant algae bloom in Lake Erie this year. Although it will be smaller than the one in 2017, there’s still cause for concern.

Posted by Theresa McClenaghan, Executive Director and Counsel, CELA on July 26, 2018

In most parts of Ontario in the first week of July, the hot humid heat wave that hung over the region for days was unbearable. Many had the option of turning on our air conditioners or escaping to summer cottages for the long weekend. But for the most vulnerable among us, this was not an option. In Montreal, 53 people died from the heat.